"Будущее дизайна – это работа с данными"

Интервью с Джоном Беллом, продакт-дизайнером в Twitter.

Q: If you had to hire a product designer, what would you pay attention to? 

A: I differ from a lot of designers on this topic. Type this question into Google and you’ll see a lot of similarities in the responses, and I agree with them. But I think there are other important skills that don’t get enough emphasis.

First is curiosity. I know a lot of designers who are master “hoop jumpers” but that limits them. If you’re waiting for the teacher or your boss to assign you to an idea, rather than being excited to tinker with things on your own, you won’t have the same success as a designer, engineer, or maker. This is one of my favorite insights on this topic, and I highly recommend everyone read it.

Second is reliability. Imagine you charted out the last 100 tasks you said you’d complete. Did you complete all 100? Did you complete 50, but make sure to explain the status of the other 50? Most people I know agree to too many things, so their chart is perhaps 20% complete, 20% updated status, 60% completely ignored or missing. If you follow through with your commitments and always explain your status, you’ll be better off than most people.

Third is humility. I talk about it here at minute 17. The future belongs to people who know how to collaborate well with others. Those who know how to be diplomatic. The special people who can focus on helping the entire team instead of only helping themselves. I don’t believe in natural talent. I believe in hard work, and if you’re easy to work with. In my experience, nothing else matters as much.

Q: Is there a book you'd definitely recommend to any product designer?

A: How To Win Friends and Influence People. I recommend it to everyone who asks this question, and everyone on a team I manage.

Q: What are the tools you use the most in your work? Maybe some methodologies, frameworks, principles or software or hardware products?

A: Pen and paper, and staying low fidelity much longer than anyone else recommends.

Q: In your work, how do you prioritize what is important at the moment? Do you use any special technics to focus on it and avoid distractions? 

A: Every day I write down everything I could be working on, then I pick three things. Then I do those three things. And after I do that, I try not to worry about the other things. I’ll get to them.

I’ve learned that there’s always more to do. There’s always more stress you can add. But focusing the other way, understanding when to slow down, learning how to say no more often, appreciating how to set boundaries around your time, avoiding meetings that don’t add value, these all help a lot more.

When I have a reasonable amount of work, I do my small list of things to a much higher level. I’m easier to work with. And I’m reliable. Those traits are much more important than being busy and stressed all the time. And the results have shown up clearly in my work.

Q: What a successful product designer will never do? 

A: Make stakeholders and partners feel inferior. There’s a Maya Angelou quote that says “People may not remember what you did or said but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

I’ve made people feel bad before. I’ve had a temper. I’ve been rude. But I’ve learned to get enough sleep, keep myself mentally healthy, eat the right food, study diplomacy and social interactions, and do everything in my power to work to always treat people around me with respect. I try to live my life as if everyone around me has something to teach me. Because they can!

 But some people think they’re too talented or too special to work with. And they’re impossible to work with. They can single-handedly destroy the morale of an entire team, and by extension, ruin an entire product. Great products come from great teams. Great teams come from great relationships. And great relationships are not possible with entitled, rude, self-centered people.

Q: How do you think the role of product designer will change in 10 years?

A: With all due respect to Doug Bowman, the future belongs to 41 shades of blue. The future of design is already here, and it’s about data.

Let’s say you spend a week making three different designs for a new webpage. Now let’s say engineers could spend the same amount of time making a testing framework so the company could experiment with 100 or 1000 different variations to see which one performs best.

What if your three designs tested at places #174, #673, and #952? You’d have to admit that if it’s the company’s job to make money, and your job to make the company money, and the robots came up with 173 versions that made more money than your version, the company should probably go with the robe-design rather than yours. Most designers aren’t ready for this, but this reality is already here.

The future isn’t about picking the most beautiful bespoke color combinations, or the best typographic combinations, or frequently inventing new interaction patterns for each new feature or product. The future is about exploiting machine learning to find the best solutions according to data models, not your gut. That doesn’t necessarily mean learning code and machine learning (although it helps a lot!) but it does mean learning humility.

A good data model will always find a better design than you can invent by yourself. You can be scared by that our you can learn to harness that power to become ten times more effective. That route is going to be a lot more fun.